Wagner James Au reports on virtual worlds, VR & Internet culture

Thursday, January 10, 2019

Staying Power of New VR Games Suggest Emergence of "Solid, Niche Market" (Comment of the Week)

Last week I noted usage of VR headsets on Steam still remains below 1% of the market, but Sinespace CPO Adam Frisby has a more positive perspective on the same data:

Here's a interesting chart, which was pointed out to me recently. [See above and here.] That's 10 popular VR games over time (and yes, there's some selection bias there, it's not all of them). The key thing to note is that these are all VR-only games (no desktop users).

The interesting thing here to note is staying power -- Fallout 4 VR, Skyrim VR, etc all were flash in the pan, people picked them up, and dropped them. What we're seeing with newer titles like Beat Saber is retention - people are going back into the games over and over again, which has not really happened with VR titles until the past 6 months or so.

That gives me some evidence that there is some long term viability here - the problems though are still numerous. A lot of the fundamental hardware issues have not been addressed yet; weight, comfort, heat/sweat, etc are substantially better than two years ago, but still not nearly as solved as they need to be. And the other big issue is space - not everyone has room for a 2x2m+ play area where they can sprawl out.

That said, I think if the market grows 5-10x from now (to 10% of the PC gaming population), that's enough for a solid, but niche market segment -- like RPGs/RTSs which occupy a similar percentage.

I actually agree with this: It's quite possible we'll see VR headset growth reach 1 in 10 of the PC gamer population. That would be enough to sustain a small ecosystem of low budget indie VR game developers. Technically that would make VR games a niche of a niche (core PC gamers) of a niche (core gamers including console gamers), but for folks like Beat Games Studio based in Prague, it's quite sustainable.